A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes

The Poet Speaks of Places A Close Reading of Langston Hughes's
Literary Use of PlaceJames de Jongh

1

It has been the longstanding practice of African American verbal
culture to transform literal spaces into topical spaces for rhetorical
and figurative purposes. Like the broader culture of black Americans, our literature tempered the historic experience of dislocation, slavery, and discrimination by seeking terms with which to
root itself in the African Diaspora. Over time, this discourse of
spatial signing has evolved into a literary strategy of allusion to a
diversity of symbolic and spiritual spaces in the figurative practice
of black writers.
1 Allusions to the Old Testament iconography of
place by which enslaved blacks identified themselves with the
enslaved Israelites in Egypt and Babylon in the geography of their
song reverberate distinctively in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers, ”
the debut poem young Langston Hughes scribbled on an envelope
as the train taking him to another summer in Mexico with his
father crossed the Mississippi. In “Rivers, ” Hughes claimed this
legacy-vocabulary of place—encompassing “downriver, ” the
term for all the dreaded places in the lower South to which slaves
were sold off, “the riverside, ” one of the relative safe havens and
sites of resistance within the domain of the plantation itself, and
“over Jordan, ” the beckoning frontier of freedom visible from

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